DumpsterBossPro Blog — Roll-Off Dispatch

Roll-Off Dispatch Reports: What to Review Every Week

Every roll-off week has a story. Maybe one truck carried twice the work of another. Maybe pickups kept slipping. Maybe a contractor's cans kept coming back overweight and the charges never made it to the invoice. You will not see it from inside the day. You see it in a weekly review.

Closing the loop from job to invoice, covered in From Completed Haul to Paid Invoice: Closing the Loop After Roll-Off Dispatch, is a daily habit. This is the weekly one.

Jobs by Type

Start with how many deliveries, pickups, swaps, dump-and-returns and relocates you ran. The mix tells you a lot. A week heavy on deliveries means a lot of cans went out and pickups are coming. A week heavy on swaps means active contractor sites.

Compare the mix week to week. Trends help you plan trucks and staffing before busy season hits.

Look at the split between new deliveries and pickups too. If deliveries are steadily outpacing pickups, more cans are going out than coming back, and you may run short on a size soon. If pickups are outpacing deliveries, demand may be slowing.

Load by Truck

Look at how much work each truck did. If one truck consistently runs more jobs and more dump runs, it may be time to rebalance territories or shifts. If a truck is consistently light, ask why: maybe it is the one only trusted with small cans.

Time clock records help here too, showing how long each driver's days actually ran.

Compare the work a truck did with the hours its driver logged. A truck with few jobs but long hours may be stuck at the landfill, stuck in traffic or stuck with bad route order. Each of those has a different fix, and the numbers point you toward which one to look at.

Open Requests and Waiting Time

Look at what is still on the Waiting List and how long it has been there. Requests that sat for days point to a capacity problem, a size you are short on or a type of job everyone avoids.

Pickups are the ones to watch most closely. A pickup that waits is a customer looking at a full can, and possibly extra rental days you will have to decide whether to charge.

If a certain type of request keeps sitting, ask why. Maybe nobody likes the long drive to one part of the county. Maybe the 40-yard requests wait because only one truck runs them. Those are business decisions — a new truck, a different price, a service area limit — that the report helps you make.

Rentals Past Their Included Days

Look for cans that are past their included days. Some customers are fine paying the daily rate. Others simply forgot to call. A text asking whether they are ready for pickup often gets the can back and keeps the customer happy.

These are also the cans you cannot send to someone else, which matters when you are short on a size.

Pay attention to your contractor accounts here. Cans left on site for months can become a habit. Sometimes that is fine and billed correctly. Sometimes it is a can that should have come back weeks ago. A weekly look keeps both cases visible.

Missing Weights and Unpaid Invoices

Check for completed pickups and swaps without a scale-ticket weight. Each one is likely a missed overweight charge. Then look at unpaid invoices, and decide which ones need a personal call beyond the automatic payment follow-ups.

If the same driver or account keeps showing up in these lists, address it directly.

Track whether the same problems show up week after week. One missing weight is a mistake. The same driver missing weights every week is a training issue. The same account paying late every month is a terms issue. Patterns are where reports earn their time.

Missing weights are worth tracking as a number over time. If the count drops week after week, the habit is taking hold. If it stays flat, the process needs another look — maybe the step is easy to forget, or maybe drivers do not understand why it matters.

Make It a 20-Minute Habit

A weekly review does not need to be long. Twenty minutes on the same day each week, looking at the same things, is enough to catch most problems before they grow.

Bring one or two findings from the review into the next week's planning. If pickups slipped, block time for them. If a truck was overloaded, rebalance. The review only pays off when it changes what happens on the board.

Next in the series is training a new roll-off dispatcher. For the reports and dispatch tools together, visit the DumpsterBossPro roll-off dispatch software page.